Tuesday, February 18, 2014

What Is a Reasonable Accomodation With A Crisis Of Consciousness?

On Wednesday, February 12, the Kansas House voted 72-49 to approve HB 2453,
which offers legal protection to individuals and businesses that refuse
service for homosexual couples, specifically those looking to get
married. Under the bill’s language, individuals, businesses and
government employees would be immune from legal reprisal for refusing
service if they have “sincerely held religious beliefs”
opposing customers’ marriages. The bill is described as
protecting religious freedom.
The Kansas House of Representatives passed the bill
(pdf) (A copy of the Kansas Bill is attached as Appendix A) that would
have broadly legalized discrimination against homosexuals. The bill was
halted. But the
fight isn’t over.Conservatives are trying to use religious
freedom as a means of
limiting the effects of the spread of homosexual values upon the
majority population.Clearly Christians and other morally offended
Americans have had enough, but what is a reasonable response to the
radical homosexual agenda?
Supporting the bill on the Kansas House floor, Republican state Rep. Charles Macheersproclaimed
that “discrimination is horrible. It’s hurtful. … It has no place in
civilized society, and that’s precisely why we’re moving this bill.”
The bill, written out of fear that the state may soon face an Oklahoma-style gay marriage ruling,
will now easily pass the Republican Senate and be signed into law by
the Republican governor. The result will mark Kansas as the first state,
though certainly not the last, to legalize separate homosexual and straight people in virtually every arena of life.
The bill’s scope was impressive in its expansiveness: Kansans would
have been able to legally refuse to provide just about any service to
anyone whose relationship they find offensive for religious reasons. The bill specifically enumerated
adoption, foster care, counseling, social services, employment and
employment benefits, as well as the general categories of “services,
accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges”, as
permissible areas for refusing to provide the service.
In addition to barring all anti-discrimination lawsuits against private
employers, the new law permits government employees to deny service to
gays in the name of “religious liberty.” This is nothing new,
but the sweep of Kansas’ statute is breathtaking. Any government
employee is given explicit permission to discriminate against gay
couples—not just county clerks and DMV employees, but literally anyone
who works for the state of Kansas.
And if a homosexual believed
himself to have been discriminated against by anyone decided to sue,
they would have not only lost, but under
this bill, they would have had to pay the prevailing parties' attorney’s
fees.
This backlash is, quite possibly, a response to the
increasing spread of homosexual marriage, and the wave of law suits
brought by homosexual couples against legitimate private business owners
who refuse to take pictures at homosexual weddings and refuse to bake
wedding cakes for homosexual couples because it violates the conscious
and transgresses the religious rights of the business owners.
This
is the real area of debate. It is
whether religiously affiliated institutions like schools or churches and
for-profit, non-religiously affiliated businesses should be able to
turn away homosexual customers on the grounds of religious freedom. It's
the wedding-cake scenario,
where an employee at a bakery or a photographer is asked to provide
services to a same-sex couple celebrating a wedding. The tragic part of
that is that homosexuals believe that it is justifiable to drive those
small business owners out of business all together because they find it
offensive to their religious beliefs to work for homosexual couples.
Some of these family businesses have been around for 30 to 50 years.

In
Kansas homosexual marriage has been banned by constitutional amendment
since 2006. Kansas legislators asserted that this law was intended to
protect the
rights of normal religious folks to exercise their beliefs without state
interference.

Religious freedom is a cornerstone of the US constitution. The right
to live and worship as we choose is a foundational American value,
highlighted in the very first of the original amendments.

As the Kansas defeat suggests, socially conservative states are
inclined to pass more expansive exemptions. But legislators in other red
states will likely take a lesson from the defeat and limit their
scope; however, they will still be broader than those in, say, liberal
Massachusetts. Just how broad depends on how quickly legislators in red
states act. The Kansas bill didn’t become law possibly because it was overly broad.
It was a beginning. More of these laws are being drafted in other
states. They are headed for the U S Supreme Court. Since Freedom Of
Religion is a Constitutionally protected fundamental American right
guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, and homosexual marriage is not
mentioned in the Constitution, the Left-leaning Supreme Court will have
to decide which right is deserving of Constitutional protection.

(Adopted from "Kansas’ anti-gay bill another attempt to force warped Christianity on others"

About Me

I am a thoroughly civilized, humane, cosmopolitan, polished, restrained, enjoyable, entertaining Info-maniac. I am a staunch exponent of individual dignity, freedom, equal access to legal services, and equal protection of the law. Here I hope to demonstrate my emotional restraint, humbleness of sentiment, psychological subtlety, lucid style, and simple language, without evading political reality or eternal truth. Daily I am excited that I have the right to create the beginning of a new self and to challenge old habits and attitudes I no longer choose to accept. I choose to relax in the present with my direction firmly in mind. I have an enormous capacity for creative and clever ideas and thoughts. It is phenomenal what I can do. I am capable of so much learning and absorbing a lot of information. My potential is a source of pleasant surprise for me.
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